Now, what was I going to write about this week?
…
Nope, it’s gone.
I had considered a piece on words that sound like two or more other words: words such as ‘faucet’, ‘moron’ and ‘Israelites’. Words like these are among the great gifts of the English language, manna from Heaven for crossword compilers and people who like to misinterpret song lyrics. Remember that brilliant Maxell ad of the 1980s featuring the Desmond Dekker classic?
‘Oh-oh me ears are alight.’
A frequent cry in my house is, ‘Anyone seen my khaki?’ If we were living in Utah this might be confusing but Reigate doesn’t have a very large contingent of survivalists (or preppers as they quaintly call themselves), so whenever I hear that cry I know immediately that they’re not referring to battledress but to the small metal object that unlocks the car. Or it would, if only we could find the bloody thing.
As an interesting aside, did you know that Utah is thinking of changing its nickname to The Condiment State? Because it’s full of salt and preppers.
No? Please yourselves.
Forgetting where you left the car keys is such a common and specific affliction that you would think there’d be a proper medical name for it, wouldn’t you? Despite an extensive internet search, however, the only term I could find was ‘dementia’, which I think is possibly overstating the point, especially as research has shown that people 18-34 forget where they put their car keys more often than over-55s do.
They’re also twice as likely to forget what day of the week it is! According to the same survey, 15% of people aged 18-34 in the United States can’t remember this simple detail. That’s roughly one in seven, which, as any statistician will confirm, means that between them they are 100 per cent likely to forget the entire week!
The survey concludes with the revelation that two fifths of the American public have mislaid at least one everyday item in the past week – not entirely surprising, given that half of them lost their marbles last month.
The paradoxical thing about ‘forgetfulness’ is that it’s a really easy word to remember. Perhaps that’s because it’s one of those lovely long, mellifluous words that has not one suffix but two. Like listlessness, wholesomeness and shoeburyness (the sensation you experience when you forget your wellies while walking by the Thames Estuary).
Anyway, it’s a particularly bad time of year for forgetting things so I won’t fill your head with any more trivia. You’ll find plenty of tips online for helping to remember where you put things, such as filming yourself on your phone as you put them down. Which is great advice – as long as you can remember where you put your phone.
